> Consider, when I was doing some fs benchmark, my inode slab cache was> over 120k items on a 128MB machine. At 480 butes per inode, this is> almost 58 MB, close to half of RAM. Reducing this to exactly ext2> sized inodes would save (50 - 27) * 4 * 120k = 11MB of memory (on 32-bit> systems)!!! (This assumes nfs_inode_info is the largest).

Was this with a recient kernel (post Alexander Viro's dcache pressure fix)?
If not I suggest rerunning the benchmark. I had/have a patch to apply pressure
to the dcache and icache from kswapd but its not been needed here since the above
fix.